Tag: craft

I’ve been lazy with my writing. For a while I was justifying my non-writing behaviour with the fact that I got a new job and had to move provinces. Then I was doing freelance work and I just didn’t have time (although my Netflix playlist will tell a different tale). I just kept coming up with excuses, and yeah, I’ve been busy and life has been chaotic, but is that ever going to change? Probably not. There are always going to be reasons to not write.
And so, I have been sitting down for at least ten minutes every day, and writing from a prompt.

I thought I’d share one with you.

This prompt directed me to look at an object and describe how it tastes. I’m not the greatest at following directions, as you will soon read:

I love food – food of all kinds. Most people identify with preferences for either sweet or salty, but I identify with edible. If it’s edible, I want it.

It’s rare to find something I don’t like the taste of. I will stop eating some foods based on other factors. For example, after an extended period of time of eating the same thing, I will eventually hit a wall, like the egg wall. There is nothing worse than the egg wall and it usually extends to chicken and fish. The poultry-fish wall. Just stop and visualize that for a second, the hitting of a fish and poultry wall.

Unfortunately, there is no chip or candy wall. I could eat from both of those food groups until I became one of them. People would stop inviting me over. It’s undesirable, my crumbly, oily chip self, leaving grease spots on the fabric of the couch in your living room. You’d find chip crumbs in your bed if you had me as an overnight guest.

I’m not interested in describing the taste of food. Who cares what it tastes like? Just give me more of it.

I’ll even eat paper. I think that’s what my appreciation for the smell of books is all about. A used bookstore to me is like a roast in the oven. Words spilling over like meat juices in a pan, saturating my brain. Oh, the words taste like a salty broth, dribbling out the corners of my mouth and onto mashed potato pages.

After writing all of that gold…I wonder if maybe I shouldn’t stop writing altogether.

I live quite a routine life; go to work Monday – Friday, work out 5 times a week, drink lots of water, eat food at pretty regular times of the day, and all of this routine works well for me. Sometimes though, I need a bit of chaos in my life. I mentioned in a previous post that I am a pantser type of writer. To recap this term, it basically means someone who writes by the seat of his or her pants, as opposed to those who sit down and plot a story out.

This is where the free fall style of writing comes in.

With free fall writing, you grab a writing prompt, set a time limit and just write. Get the gunk and junk out of your head and onto the page and don’t stop to think about it.

There are a few reasons why I love free fall so much:

You come up with so many ideas that you can scrap or build on later.

Excercising this style of writing really pulls you out of your head and lets your creativity take the reins, producing the most random content.

It’s a mess.

Note: the mess is undoubtedly the reason why I love free fall writing so much, and it’s incredibly important. We live in a world where everyone is posting their best versions of themselves on social media. While it’s lovely to look at, it is unbelievably unrealistic. The craft of writing is dirty, it’s messy, the words that come out are more often than not, complete crap. I don’t think there is one person in the world that can just write a perfect short story, or novel with just a first draft. It’s why it’s called a first draft, not final. In the first draft, there are gaps in the story, characters names might change mid-way through, the plot isn’t fully developed, whatever, it’s all a mess. And it’s real.

I’m going to share my free fall writing on this blog, and pieces of my first drafts. I want to show everyone that the first words on the paper are supposed to be garbage. It’s what comes after that defines you as a writer, the work you put in to make sense of the mess from the free fall writing. But, the story starts here, amid the chaos.

What kind of writer are you? Pantser? Plotter? A mix? What’s your favourite way to start building your story? Comment below and tell me!

Ps. I feel like I’ve made myself sound quite drab. I actually do a lot of things spontaneously, or out of the routine order of life. I write about all that in another blog though…